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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (150988)	9/6/2002 3:30:30 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1586327

However, it was GM's actions that insured there would be no chance of a revival That doesn't make sense to me. GM didn't buy up all the systems that where still active. Yes, that's true.......but they bought a lot of them. Also if the streetcars where working so well then someone else could have made a new system when GM shut down the old one. There's no question that these systems were not gold mines. However, their lack of success had a lot to do with the artificial holding down of their fares by the cities. In the end though, cities would have had to take them over due to the formidable competition from cars after WWII. I think the problem was that many "public" transport options have difficulty making a profit if they are not subsidized. GM and its partners tried to run busses in place of the street cars by they also lost money most of the time. I don't know if the bus lines faced similar price restrictions to the street cars but if they did that would explain the problem. Another possible explanation is that both systems where forced to have extensive service to get permission from the cities to operate, in other words they could not just run the routes that where profitable. I would think the economics of the streetcars would be similar to that of buses, the streetcars (if as modern as the buses) would probably be a bit more efficient, but the busses would be a bit more flexible. Mass transit systems were profitable when cars were not so readily accessible and cities did not restrict fare increases. After WWII, the American middle class began to grow and cars became affordable commodities presenting a more palatable alternative to mass transit. Increasingly, mass transit required public subsidies.......its why GM got out of the bus transit business fairly quickly. What made GM's actions so objectionable were not that they did something illegal.......although they were pushing it............but rather they made it virtually impossible to continue some kind of light rail system without starting from scratch. And they knew that......that's why they dismantled the systems after buying them and encouraged the cities to pull up the tracks if, in fact, they didn't do it themselves. Millions and millions of new track have had to be laid in Portland, Los Angeles, Buffalo etc to replace the track that was pulled in the 50's and 60's. Its why I consider GM's actions malicious. ted